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climenole writes "Technomancer wrote: 'Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu Linux's founder, maintains that he and Ubuntu are doing right by the Linux community and the even larger open-source community. In recent weeks, Ubuntu has been criticized for not giving Linux enough support. Specifically, the complains have been that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, doesn't do enough for producing Linux source code.'"

I'm a regular Ubuntu user. I use it on 13 machines in my shop and personal life. Having it done and well integrated with easily obtainable extras makes my life much easier. From less powerful to my most powerful this product just seems to work. So, to that end I do thank Mark Shuttleworth for his efforts and I hope he realizes that he has made other's lives better.

Not everyone contributes back to society or to the world at large in equal measure. Canonical does some things that others don't and others do what Canonical doesn't. To use code contributions to the kernel and to Gnome as a measuring stick just doesn't seem right. Let's be smart and look at the overall effect this has on the world.

The value of contributions to Gnome depends so much on the rest of the Gnome community, on the long standing Gnome/KDE rivalry, and other external factors. If you use contributions to Gnome as a major metric, shouldn't Canonical get some points for indirectly contributing to KDE, XFCE and such via their Kubuntu/Xubuntu connections?
There's also Canonical's hardware certification program and their 3rd party software certification program. The hardware cert program has three tiers, and these are designed to give some needed flexibility to hardware makers and software (particularly driver software) authors.
Ubuntu Certified is the most involved, and from Canonical's viewpoint, probably the most rigorous. OEMs submit systems to Canonical's testing facility. Certification and testing is done by Canonical's engineers.
Ubuntu Ready is much easier for Canonical, as the OEMs self-test their systems using Canonical's certification test suite. OEMs still have to submit their results to Canonical for final review if they want to claim to be Ubuntu ready, but can also use some elements of the test software for other purposes such as internal validation. A good way to evaluate Canonical's over all contribution to the Linux community might be to include how well they have shared this and related code and how well they have modified it based on OEM feedback.
Works with Ubuntu. This designation is used for peripherals, such as printers or USB storage devices, that don't usually need the time and associated costs of a more rigorous certification process for testing before it's reasonable to certify them. It makes it easier for makers of such peripherals to keep up with the Ubuntu 6 month release cycle.
Canonical offers frequent symposiums and group meetings for hardware makers wanting to use this process - in fact, there's one scheduled this month.

I'm sure someone else will have said it, but I reckon this is one of those cases of "it can't be measured, therefore it must have no value". Ubuntu has done amazing work getting Linux more visible and better established, that alone is worth a significant amount.

That seems to be the gist of the article, and is one case where some members of the OSS community have really lost sight of something important: code is not the only thing projects need. It is true that Canonical hasn't done particularly much in the way of code, but it has found other ways to pull its weight, particularly in terms of user support. And pull its weight it most certainly does. Whether or not it does more than other companies, I can't say: you can't measure it like you could lines of code or number of applications. But it is grossly unfair to call it parasitic: it does things that frankly nobody else is bothering to do on the scale that Canonical does it. It has earned treatment as an equal to the more established players, even if it fulfills a very different function from them.

This I can definately agree with. I recently attended an open source software conference. Ubuntu and Fedora sent people there (I remember that Jono Bacon was there from Ubuntu specifically).

The Ubuntu folks seemed actually far more enthusiastic about drumming up COMMUNITY support, rather than just digging up more programmers. They were encouraging everyone to help - not just with code, but with testing and QC, and their biggest push was talking up the importance of volunteers for doing user documetation

The Ubuntu folks seemed actually far more enthusiastic about drumming up COMMUNITY support

Bingo. I've been using and developing on UNIX and then Linux for close on to twenty years now, and I now choose to use Ubuntu on my home machines because of one thing and one thing only: the Ubuntu community forums. It's the first UNIX/Linux forum that I've ever used where the default answer to any question isn't "I'm far to busy to answer this. You've got the source, debug it yourself, noob". More often than not, t

I really do not see what is so special about Ubuntu. As far as having a user friendly desktop is concerned, Mandriva is better and Mepis and others at least as good.

Because Ubuntu's marketing is better than Mandrake/Mandriva ever was, so users actually know about it. Some 5, 8 years ago loads of people wanted a Linux desktop. Mandrake had it, but everyone installed "server oriented" Redhat or Suse, because those were the names they knew.

Besides Cannonical/Ubuntu went out of their way to give anyone a ISO file, back in the day, if you wanted Mandrake (Mandriva, now) they wouldn't just give you an ISO. So Ubuntu came along and really took the crown, despite the years of

Besides Cannonical/Ubuntu went out of their way to give anyone a ISO file

Everyone gave iso files, but ubuntu marketing did one better, they sent you actual discs with art by the bucket load. I have around 25 of the 2005 first release of ubuntu, they formerly sent heaps to anyone that wanted them. Being a linux guy I gave them to a heap of people to get them on to linux.

About a year ago I upgraded my synaptic (the only user-friendly package manager I know so far). Turns out that the Debian guys missed a critical flaw which made Synaptic crash when loading the repos. Downgrading synaptic using command-line tools was a royal pain in the ass. That's the kind of errors that I hate, and the guys criticizing Ubuntu are much more prone to commit them.

While I don't like Ubuntu myself (for some glitches I've experienced - ironically, in the user-friendliness area), I do agree that it has set the bar on user-friendliness. More user-friendly = more popular. More popular = more pressure on the devs to write software that just works.

As an example, I'll use Mepis 8.5 - it's being released with the latest version of KDE. Well guess what, the installation screen is quite unusable if you have an nVidia video card. You're stuck at 640x480 (or 800x600 if you're lucky), and the installation screens are clipped. Sure, you can install the drivers in RAM, but then you have to reboot. DOH. All installed drivers vanish. Another problem that could be solved with community support.

With more community support, these problems will go again after the devs realize that the world they're writing software for is NOT a world filled with closets stacked with old network cards, cables, old consoles, a hard disk full of debugging and developing software and regexp cheat sheets stappled on a nearby wall.

As much as it hurts, the devs need to get off their clouds, open their eyes and see that the people who use distros like Ubuntu are people who have a life - ok, a busy life - and don't have the resources, the time, nor the brains to solve those pesky problems.

I still remember the days where one had to edit the xfree86.conf file by hand after following a series of instructions. I sincerely hope those days don't ever come back again.

I don't know. I'm a fan of Ubuntu, but I find that after three or four dist-upgrades, enough things don't work that it's worth doing a reinstall (keeping all the important customizations and custom installed programs, naturally -/home,/etc and/usr/local).

Such as right now. One of my customizations was alt+left/right to switch workspaces, combined with a devilspie script to start common applications on particular workspaces. The idea was that since you switch between tabs/open files with alt+up/down in ma

I can see how this might be a perception, but it's not reasonable. Lots of good C programmers are quite poor at systems administration. Maintaining a distro can be a horrible task, since you are essentially being sysadmin for a completely unknown system. The situation is made worse when programmers who write the source code you're implementing capriciously change things around (or break them) for

You hit the nail on the head. I've recently been promoted to a more bureaucratic place at my company, and I've come to realize that a lot of things I considered of uttermost importance in software development were not as crucial as I thought. Now, I'm not saying they're not necessary. But I overestimated them. Also, I've learned that it's the sales department which makes the companies earn their income. No income, no salaries. No salaries, no employees.

Linux devs who have never understood the management and marketing side of companies, simply lack the vision needed to improve and promote the kernel/OS they love so much.

There are other distros with equally good installer that are more user friendly in some ways, which still manage to contribute code as well.

Consider Mandriva. Much less well funded than Canonical. Better installer. Better config (I find myself needing to edit config files in Ubuntu for stuff I can use the Control Centre GUI in Mandriva). Mandriva all time contributions to Gnome 's are about half of Canonical's, and they have contributed significantly to KDE, and are still doing quite a lot of other stuff ht [mandriva.com]

From less powerful to my most powerful this product just seems to work.

Granted, Ubuntu works pretty well with modern hardware. I've been surprised at how well it works with pluggable devices like printers, controllers and iThingies.

Except when doesn't.

After SMB mount found itself deprecated you wouldn't believe the pain I had to go through to get CIFS mount to work properly with a remote SMB share whose file system contained folders and files with Asian characters in their names. And it still doesn't create folders and files with the correct ugos - they're visible on all the U

Real Mac hardware seems to like Ubuntu better then your Hackintosh. That's a bit odd considering the fact that you wouldn't expect MacOS to be able to deal with much of anything that deviates from a genuine Mac.

Well, so to sum up:* You tried the tailored Operating System to your Hardware.* You tried Ubuntu* Ubuntu was worse, than the tailored Operating System to your Hardware.

If your Hardware has errors, or some specific quirks, which may not be detected by an overblown Debian fork (which however wasn't in the summary of tried Operating Systems - only the tailored Operating System to your Hardware was) you blame Ubuntu for not being userfriendly, as response to a post describing he was glad, that Ubuntu tried to f

To be fair, unlike those other fights, Protestants versus Catholics is a pretty important one. Religion as we know it, at least in the Christian parts, was seriously shaken up by the reformation. Even the Catholic church which insists upon being the one true Christian faith, was forced to make serious changes some of which are still being debated nearly 500 years later.

Is it his opinion that the [default] desktop environment that Ubuntu provides is better for the Linux desktop ecosystem than all other environments at the moment?

Having tried the few options available, I hereby submit that there is an environment that in my opinion, is better for desktop Linux in functionality and license as compared to the default. I leave names out on purpose.

Ubuntu has encouraged me to submit bugs and even maintain a ppa for packages I couldn't find on ubuntu. Ubuntu has encouraged me to contribute because the community is active and friendly. Redhat never did that for me.

A lot of Ubuntu's critics say what they say because they think they are "too good" for it since it comes with training wheels on. Ubuntu, being a distro, has no obligation to write source code -- that is done by thousands of programmers elsewhere, and they are doing a damn fine job. A distro is meant to package the work of those programmers in a way that people can use it without needing a CS degree, and Ubuntu is getting that right imo.

So, the critics need to stfu and stick with their obscure distros.

This is the "cool people" phenomenon, like we see in music. These people will go round telling everyone how much they like X niche band as long as nobody knows about it, but if/when that band becomes popular, they'll start saying "Oh, I don't like that any more!". Same here, except with niche software.

I love it on the desktop and use it on all my desktops, laptops and even HTPC, but ubuntu server needs some work. The fact that it comes with a splash screen boot by default is a clear indicator that Canonical does not spend enough time thinking about the server version.

The thing is, Ubuntu server isn't trying to necessarily capture the marketshare of "serious" servers because those are already well-entrenched with contracts but rather competing with offerings like Windows Home Server.

It doesn't matter if it is "trying to capture marketshare" or not. Some design decisions are just boneheaded for the use case in question. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're trying to take over the world.

The thing is, Ubuntu server isn't trying to necessarily capture the marketshare of "serious" servers because those are already well-entrenched with contracts but rather competing with offerings like Windows Home Server.

Nuh uh. Ubuntu Server is certainly marketed towards enterprises, and not just very small ones. Canonical advertises its support for virtualization, cloud computing, and integration with enterprise authentication systems.Let's look at the Ubuntu Server [ubuntu.com] web page:

Could you tell me what "training wheels" means in this context? Having a streamlined distro? Fixing bugs? I know you haven't said that, but it sounds so utterly retarded that I'm having a hard time just trying to understand the concept.

My guess is that "training wheels" means using a GUI and a mouse click to do configuration, instead of vi and editing the config file directly, then sending a SIGHUP signal to the process directly.

Personally, I lean toward the manual editing (using nano/pico, not vi) but I mainly use Linux on servers with no GUI. For individual use, it would seem a GUI would make more sense, assuming your goal is to make it easier for more people to actually use the software.

A lot of Ubuntu's critics say what they say because they think they are "too good" for it since it comes with training wheels on.

I don't hate it because it has training wheels. I hate it because it has some of the worst hardware support I've seen out of any Linux distro that I've tried. I've seen way too many people try Ubuntu, have some problem with poorly supported hardware (or the installer entirely refusing to run), and go 'wow, Linux sucks.' and give up. That is why I always recommend Mandriva. I have yet to find any hardware it won't run on. Even the weird Dell branded broadcom wifi chips usually work without any extra effort.

Red Hat are the main critics as far as I know, and they're not obscure or trying to look "cool". Their criticism is that they pay a lot of money to develop Linux's core software while Canonical doesn't pay nearly so much, which is true.

On the other hand you're right that Canonical have no obligation to do so, and you can make the case that Canonical are much less profitable and don't have the sorts of clients which need to kind of support provided by having programmers which work on Linuxes core software

(...) you can make the case that Canonical are much less profitable and don't have the sorts of clients which need to kind of support provided by having programmers which work on Linuxes core software.

I think the last bit is really important. A lot of the core kernel stuff that Red Hat does are things that aren't very relevant to the average desktop user like heavy multi-CPU/NUMA/virtualization/network/other server loads. The average *buntu user would be much better served if they e.g. funded a flash replacement or ran a laptop compatibility testing program or shaved 10 seconds off the boot process. Don't get me wrong, there's things in the core systems that would help the desktop too but I don't feel th

This is the "cool people" phenomenon, like we see in music. These people will go round telling everyone how much they like X niche band as long as nobody knows about it, but if/when that band becomes popular, they'll start saying "Oh, I don't like that any more!". Same here, except with niche software.

There's some of that, but mostly, I think it's that people (almost always wrongly) assume that everyone else is like them. I think Canonical does a good job with Ubuntu, but Slackware suits my purposes better. I don't for a minute assume that most users would benefit from my personal choices -- Ubuntu is probably the best distro for non-technical users -- but a lot of people, like some of Canonical's critics, are unable or unwilling to see things from any point of view other than their own personal interest

Ubuntu is without a doubt the best distro for most users. Yeah, I know I could have more customization with Debian, yeah, I know I could be faster if I ran Gentoo, yeah, I know I could be more on the bleeding edge if I used Fedora, but when it comes down to it, Ubuntu is the best distro for most people. I -like- the fact there is a forum where I can post a question and it is answered in about 15 minutes, I like the fact I can do 99.999% of the things I need to do without using the CLI, and I like the fact that I have a lot of software in the repository.

And the best part is there isn't really any sacrifice. Is there anything that I can't do with Ubuntu that I can do with Debian? Just because I don't have to use a CLI for everything doesn't mean I can't if I want, etc.

Yeah, so Ubuntu doesn't have the nerd "cred" that I'd be getting if I ran Gentoo, but I have a usable system that is nearly infinitely customizable without having to sacrifice usability.

I don't "hate" using the CLI, I just prefer using a GUI for most things. CLIs are good for some things, but editing configuration files using vi is simply pointless when it should just be an option in the program. Same thing with things like disk checking and partition editing.

Ubuntu is a very popular Linux distro, which I can only assume is pulling quite a bit of interest to Linux. A fraction of these new Linux users are also logically speaking developers. And these would then be potential Linux contributors.

I have a hard time seeing how spending a lot of effort into making the most popular desktop Linux distro on the market could be a bad thing even when going as specific as Linux contributions. Developers are just a subset of users! Any successful distro is a good distro for Linux, and heck, it's not even important to be successful. That's kind of what this whole open OS is about. Play around and have fun. If you're doing well too, well, that's a nice bonus for Linux!

I've done a little back reading on this now to see what it's all about. And all I can say is for goodness sake, don't bite the hand that gives you free stuff. Personally, I usually choose gentoo or fedora. But I still recognise the value of Ubuntu.

I am an old school user from the beginning with Slackware and such. I settled on Redhat because it felt the best to me. This was before Ubuntu came out and Debian was on the map but no competition yet for Redhat. (I'm sure that will be a matter of opinion for many though.) In spite of all the great things about Ubuntu, I'm stuck with Redhat because I simply know it too well. It is largely quite predictable in the way they do things and in their philosophies. That they are active contributors to the source and supporting software is nice but not the reason I continue using and supporting Redhat.

I was dismissive of Ubuntu at first. One of the biggest turn-offs to me was the fact that nearly everyone refuses to say the name properly. (Damnit! The U makes the same sound each time! Ooo-boon-too! Why is it so frikkin hard?!) To me, that aspect alone makes me think idiots will use it. (I know I am WRONG as hell about that, but at some level, I tend to tie intelligence with linguistic skill) On top of that, I don't like the colors the defaults are using. Moreover, the naming convention? What plans have they after "Zippy Zebra?" And really? Are they intentionally copying famous comic books where the first letter of the first and last names have to be the same? (You know, like Peter Parker, Bruce Banner and all that?)

But you will notice I make no TECHNICAL complaints about Ubuntu... (well, there is one... apparently the way they set up their Avahi daemon doesn't work well with my SME DNS server... turn that off and it works fine.) That is mostly because I don't have any.

As far as the response of Shuttleworth? He's right on all counts. I completely agree with his responses. If any one distro helps make Linux a household word, it's Ubuntu. It's slick. It's polished. It seems to perform well everywhere I have seen it. And it is especially true about the source for information for the most solutions. It is the Ubuntu forums... good for me that I don't have much trouble translating from Ubuntu to Fedora. In some extremely important ways, Ubuntu is a huge contributor.

If Linux is being taken more seriously by the various industries out there, you can thank Ubuntu for a big part of it.

Are they intentionally copying famous comic books where the first letter of the first and last names have to be the same? (You know, like Peter Parker, Bruce Banner and all that?)

Yeah, because as we all know, comic books invented alliteration. It was a completely original idea of the comic book writers, and certainly not something that is so commonplace there's a word for it in the dictionary.

what's up with doing things their own way, instead of the standard way? On every other apache distribution I've seen httpd.conf is the main config file, but not on Ubuntu... it's apache2.conf. I had to look that up. Ubuntu is full of things like this.

Mind you, their way works, and Ubuntu has great support and lively community and so on... but why do they insist on being different?

It's been quite a while since I was an admin in a Debian shop, but I'm pretty sure that's how it is in Debian. Which makes sense, since Ubuntu is based on Debian, right?
I guess I'm sayin' it's not hard to say "the standard way" and mean "the way I'm used to doing things." I prefer Fedora since I use CentOS/RedHat on all my servers, but I don't know if their way is "the standard way" or if that's just how they do things.

That's a Debian peculiarity. The Debian way is quite logical and clean, and recognizes that Apache2 and Apache are separate software packages that may collide. It also supplies a nice and clean modular configuration system for Apache2 which avoids cruft, and demarcates maintainer and sysadmin configs clearly.

Most people don't seem to understand the criticism that Shuttleworth is responding to.

The open source community does not begrudge Ubuntu's success at all. The issue is that the Ubuntu project fixes a lot of bugs from "upstream" open source projects, but has so far done a poor job at submitting these patches back to the upstream projects.

I can understand why this happens: It's very, very hard to manage a project as big as a complete operating system, and very, very time consuming to have to adhere to every single protocol for contributing patches to every single upstream project. If the point is to get things done for the end user, then it happens that the upstream packages lose here. And that's where the bitterness comes in: because the upstream packages don't get these patches, it means that other operating systems that use these projects don't get these patches, either. It thus seems as if Ubuntu is only patching for itself.

I'm sure this isn't the intent, though. Some of the critics have gone a bit overboard in accusing the Ubuntu project of doing this on purpose. I think that's shortsighted and unhelpful, and that's what Shuttleworth is responding to here. Though, as eloquent as he is, he's not doing a good job in this post of addressing the critique.

My own opinion is that the fault is not with Ubuntu, but with the staggering diversity and fragmentation of the open source world. It's hard enough to create a distribution that consumes all these projects, to produce back to them is monumentally hard.

What should be done is create a more uniform way for projects to receive patches. Perhaps a central repository where these patches could be places, and project maintainers can pull these from and merge in, if they think it's appropriate.

Fat change this will happen? Maybe, maybe not. I'm very impressed by Ubuntu's leadership in getting the open source world to think more about diverse end users. I think there's an opportunity to use this leadership to try to create a more streamlines path for "upstream" contribution. Projects would benefit from bug fixes and patches, other operating systems will benefit, and everybody will just be so happy forever.

That is why I left Ubuntu. I game a lot on my PC, and I couldn't stand PulseAudio. I don't give a rat's behind about slinging audio over the network, or bluetooth support. I just want the sound to come out of the speakers ASAP with low resource usage. Debian is my new distro of choice. For a time, I contemplated just going back to Winflaws, but then I had to re-install XP on another box the other day and I was reminded how MS treats it's customers like ****.

In the blog entry, Mark writes about "... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there." From my experience, problems are not chased down but rather the Ostrich algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_algorithm [wikipedia.org] is applied.

While running karmic (9.10), I noticed a bug with the network-manager pertaining static IP addresses and wireless connectivity, which made it unable to connect to certain configured wireless access points. Lets take a look at the network-manager released with 9.10: http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/net/network-manager [ubuntu.com] , it is (0.8~a~git.20091013t193206.679d548-0ubuntu1).

Now lets look at the updates for karmic at http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic-updates/net/ [ubuntu.com] , there is not a single one (!) for network-manager. For the whole six months until the next release of 10.04, not a single update for it has been provided! They just took the git snapshot and left it in 9.10.

I do not care about the marketing strategies and public image of Linux distributions, but rather about exactly what Mark said, about "... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there."

I have used and toyed with Linux as a desktop OS since the mid 90's, beginning with Slackware, then including distros such as Red Hat, Debian, Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mepis, Gentoo, Mandrake, Sabayon, and several others. I settled on Linux Mint a few years ago, which is known as a "more complete" and better derivative of Ubuntu; Mint is Ubuntu-based but includes a number of independently developed tools and a great user interface, though it is developed by a small group of fanatics. For a change, the Mint team recently released an excellent Debian-based version, in addition to their usual Ubuntu-based releases, which has been met with a lot of excitement.

I am already using Linux Mint Debian Edition as my main OS, but I still have a ton of respect for Ubuntu and Canonical. They have done a lot to raise awareness for Linux, and have developed a very usable OS that non-expert enthusiasts can use, as well as providing a great base for many other distros. Ubuntu is not an ideal server OS, or the be-all end-all OS that is absolutely perfect, but Canonical have done a great job with it and have worked admirably to promote free and open source software. If nothing else, they have inspired their competition to make things easier for home desktop users.

Further, it probably has the least number of technical users because it's probably the most popular "plug-and-play" (or close to it) distro there is. Thus, there may be fewer people who can trouble-shoot their own problems.

All that means is that ubuntu is mis-marketed - a serious mistake, because then all linux distros get tarred with the same brush

Funny how distros like opensuse, in comparison, have almost no complaints. Shuttleworth talks about "bringing linux to the masses" - the stats show that the number of people ubuntu turns off from all linux distros is a serious problem. The most telling is that, if current trends continue, ubuntu will have more complaints than Windows in 2 years.

User-installed Linux != manufacturer-installed Windows. Not what you were saying - directly - but its worth pointing out.

I have installed Ubuntu Linux on a number of clients computers, and I've done it properly. All set up to do common tasks (DVD movies, music, flash, WINE, etc) with proper remote support. These same clients have spread the word to the point where people from all over my continent are shipping me their laptops and desktops to have it installed with Ubuntu 'properly'. Kind of overwhelming

Though I'd personally like to see them commit to VLC rather than the alternatives, and other default apps in addition.

The real existing problem that I see is a lack of games for Linux that really run well, but honestly, after watching the train wreck that was GTA 4 for Windows, well, I still enjoy Urban Terror AND it runs flawlessly on almost ever

I can't follow the link here but do you mean that there are more bugs reports in ubuntu than other distros? I would argue that the bug database is the most important feature of the ubuntu distro. I have raised bugs there and seen them propagated to the originating projects.

heh I applied for a membership on the DSL fourms 4 years ago just to post a question, and have still not been approved
I spent nearly an hour today on slackware trying to see what options I had with a no cd no usb boot system, finally on some 3rd party blog I found a 5 page walk though that read like Russian stereo instructions
so yea they may seem to have more problems, but its honestly hard to get any other distro's to even setup a localized place to ask questions, I love it on my home machines, hm how do I do that, Oh I know...
google XYZ on ubuntu and there is a half dozen threads all pointing me in the right direction
and that is a good thing, no matter how much the hardcore nurds want to spin it

This doesn't change the fact that WAY more people complain about ubuntu f$cking their machine than everyone else combined. For a distro that was supposed to get people "from here to there", it's not doing the job.

This is a combination of poor targeting to your market, and poor communications of what the end user is to expect "as good as windows" (which is a lie. linux is better than windows, but it is not a drop-in replacement, and anyone who says otherwise is a troll).

You want a non-standard install on a no usb and no cdrom system and you wonder why you have issues finding help.

At that point you are far into the realm of advance because you have to use an alternate means such as staging the contents on disk or using a pxe based install. The latter isn't terribly difficult if you haven't done it before, but the first time setup isn't for the novice.

I've been paying attention for a long time. I've done the distro hopping dance for years, and I've been advocating Linux all the while. In 15 years of Linux use, for me personally, Ubuntu comes second only to OpenSUSE as far as getting out of my way and letting me get my work done. Ubuntu is the clear favorite among family and friends whom I have foisted Linux upon over the years. I've gotten far fewer "tech guy support" calls than any other distro, spent less time dealing with computer issues over the phone and I have definitely gotten fewer complaints. Therefore, I *am* inclined to believe the stats. They are doing something right, as much as it pains some to admit.

I'm a huge KDE fan and after getting fed up with Kubuntu I tried OpenSUSE. I really wanted to like OpenSUSE, and I did at first. I was very impressed with the LVM support in the installer and the ability to import my existing fstab settings. I have various data drives and Samba shares I like to have permanently mounted, and it was a pain to have to update these every time I do an install.

But after several days of frustration an automated kernel update botched and left me with an unbootable system, and ra

Blech, there's no worse "statistic" than counting the number of Google results for various terms.

If you compare "bible" with "quran", you can see that there are about 10x the results for "bible". What does that indicate, are there 10x more Christians, or readers of the bible? You can also see that Malawi, Swaziland, Ghana, and Zimbabwe have the highest regional interest for "bible", so what can you conclude about that? Are those the most "Christian" nations? The US isn't even in the top 10, in fact all 10 are African nations. I see that Indonesia is ranked #8 for regional interest in "quran", can we conclude that Indonesia is the 8th most "Islamic" nation?

If you went on only those numbers, you would conclude that followers of the bible greatly outnumber followers of the quran. The actual difference is about 2x, not 10x. You would also conclude that Pakistan, Gambia, and Somalia are the worlds largest Islamic countries, but the largest (by population) is Indonesia.

I have Ubuntu installed on 8 machines and agree. It solves all my problems and...whenever I mess it up, which I sometimes do, the huge community or the ease of use helps me repair it. I once even deleted the entire MBR + parts of the partition table and then managed to restore it before I rebooted.

Odd. Myself and a couple of my colleagues recently got laptops preinstalled with SLED at work. The experience was generally less positive than with other (free) distros. The SLED repos are only installed after you register with Novell, and trying to get any sort of multimedia setup going on it was a nightmare. OTOH we have openSUSE on several desktop machines, works like a charm.

I guess the only advantage of SLED would be that it plays nicer with Microsoft solutions, but we don't use those too much at work.

Well, neither "A Glass of Coke" is actually a recipient made of a sugar-flavoured drink. It's a common grammatical rule called Metonymy [wikipedia.org], and it's commonly used to exemplify the language to avoid excessive verbosity.

The same could be said about the idea of prepending GNU to Linux, giving to the name the dubious function of being considered somewhat an homage or representation of the intentions of the author. Personally I'm not offended if my friends just call me "Sal" without citing everytime my father's and my grandfather's name like some aristocrat used to think. It would just make every conversation tiring, ad would give an idea of self-importance more annoying than anything else to my speaker.

Yeah I don't get this move either. Sure a line of code or theme change can move them back to the right easily but I wonder who thought it would be a good default in the first place. I love the current release though the Windows installer worked great and everything worked on my laptop after the install without my help. I only had Win XP on it previously.

They want to put other stuff on the right side. I just wish we could kill the whole title bar idea. It serves no purpose other than to waste space. Just put the buttons right on the same bar that says File Edit View in 90% of apps.